Adding Stand Alone Hyper-V – vRealize Automation Series Part 16

Nov 26, 2014 • Jonathan Frappier

A question came up on Twitter recently about how to add a stand-alone Hyper-V server as an endpoint. What I can gather from the documentation is that you need to have an agent deployed for Hyper-V but the directions were otherwise unclear so this is an attempt to document the required steps. First, the assumption is you have a Windows Server with the Hyper-V role at a minimum available (if you are running as a virtual machine; make sure the OS type is set to Hyper-V).

First, we need to install an agent for Hyper-V. For my lab I am doing this on my existing IaaS server

Log into the IaaS server as your vCAC / vRA service account

Download and run the IaaS installer from http://vcacappurl:5480/i as administrator

When you get to the Installation Type page; select Proxy Agents

Follow the wizard until you get to the Install Proxy Agent screen; enter the following information

Agent type: HyperV

Agent Name: HyperV

Manager / Model Manager Host Name: Your IaaS server if you followed along in my vRA Home Lab series

An administrative user for your HyperV server; then click the Add, and Next button

Click the install button and wait for the installation to finish

Once the installation finishes, we now need to add the agent to vRA. To do this, log into vRA as the iaasadmin user and perform the following:

Navigate to Infrastructure >> Endpoints >> Agents

Provide the FQDN for the Compute resource - your HyperV server, select the HyperV agent from the the pull down and click OK

If you click on the small magnifying glass icon, you should see information about your server - I can confirm these are the specs for my Hyper-V virtual machine:

Hover over your Hyper-V server and select New Reservation

Fill in the reservation information and click the OK button; you should now see your Hyper-V server listed

This is just adding Hyper-V as a compute resource, I assume will still need virtual machines in Hyper-V (or templates?) to create blueprints from and entitlements for that blueprint - I’ll try to get on that ASAP.

With Ansible installed, and a basic inventory file created we can now move beyond ad-hoc tasks (which by the way is still a great use case for Ansible) and take advantage of Playbooks. Playbooks are a set of commands organized as required to perform complicated tasks. Maybe you have provisioned dozens or hundreds of new virtual machines and you now need to make sure they are in the desired state - standardized versions of OpenSSL or MySQL for example, then deploy your custom software packages to those servers; that (simplistically) is where playbooks come in.